Rashad Becker, Berlin-based maker of a series of “Traditional Music of Notional Species” records on PAN as well as a noted mastering engineer, and Sote, a composer and sound-artist with roots in Iran, discuss the dislocated state of artists within the global mass or, by many metrics, mess of the present age. How healthy is the state of the global avant-garde? How possible is the idea even still? How does thinking about either or both vary in relation to geography? In conversation with Philip Sherburne.